The first clear thought that creeps into Michael K. Williams’ foggy brain is, “Where the hell am I?” Somewhere in Newark, he believes, but he has no idea where, and he can’t remember how he got here. He doesn’t drive, so did he walk? Did he get a ride? And how will he get home from here, wherever the hell “here” is — a basement in the projects? A cellar in a boarded-up drug den?

And is this Newark? Or is it Irvington? Or Paterson? Or some other place apparently erased from Williams’ memory — and God’s, too? And who are these foul-smelling losers, incoherent or passed out next to him on tattered, urine-soaked mattresses?

Slowly, the haze is lifting. Oh, yeah. He’s been on another cocaine binge. But how much time has gone by? A day? Two? More? He can’t tell. He searches for clues. Is that daylight or a street light creeping into the space? He listens for street noise. Nothin’. He reaches for his cell phone, but it’s not in his pocket. “Son of a ...” Oh, wait, that’s right. It wasn’t stolen. He used it as collateral to get the drugs.

In the outside world, unbeknownst to Williams, his friends are in a panic. They have been calling his phone for the three days he has been missing. Finally, a woman answers — the woman who is holding his phone until he can get it out of hock.

“Mike?” she says. “I don’t know no Mike. This ain’t his phone no more.” Click.

His friends call back, but she won’t answer. They’re frantic. How did she get Mike’s phone? Had he been robbed? Killed? Is he lying in an empty lot?

As Williams shakes off the daze and mulls how he’s going to explain his disappearance — it’s no biggie, really; he is, after all, an actor — his friends are driving around Newark trying to locate him.

“Yo, you seen Mike?”

Nobody has.

Williams lights a cigarette, looks around, and in the time it takes to finish off the Marlboro, long slow drag after long slow drag, another question pops into his head and he says it out loud this time: “Mike Williams, who the fuck are you?”

Jennifer BrownWilliams attends a service at Christian Love Baptist Church.

Today, Michael K. Williams is best known for the iconic characters he has created for HBO — Omar Little, the scar-faced, shotgun-toting, homosexual thug who made his living stealing from cutthroat Baltimore drug dealers on “The Wire,” and Chalky White, the black bootlegger demanding respect from the white power brokers of Atlantic City on “Boardwalk Empire,” which begins its third season this month.

But several years ago, while he starred on “The Wire,” Williams, now 45, lived a double life as a doper in Newark’s most dangerous neighborhoods — doing drugs “in scary places with scary people.” He swears it was just cocaine and pot for him — “nothing stronger”— but many of those around him were felons, some with guns, dealing or using heroin and desperate for their next hit.

On camera, millions are mesmerized by Williams, the actor who has played the baddest badass on “The Wire,” a mean-streets series thick with badasses. But off camera, starting around 2004, that badass was begging lines in out-of-the-way places from dead-enders who could’ve beat him senseless or snuffed him out at any time.

“I was playing with fire,” Williams says. “It was just a matter of time before I got caught and my business ended up on the cover of a tabloid or I went to jail or, worse, I ended up dead. When I look back on it now, I don’t know how I didn’t end up in a body bag.

“Eventually, I got so sick and tired of this charade. No one who was in my circle, who knew me as Mike, was allowing me to get high. I had to slip away to do drugs. I had to hide it. I’d be gone for days at a time. I was lonely in that part of my life. I was broke, broken and beat up. Exhausted. Empty. I finally said, ‘I can’t do this no more.’ I didn’t want to end up dead.”

But why is he telling his story now? Why fess up when most of the world hadn’t found out and his career is peaking again on “Boardwalk Empire”? Somehow, after each coke binge, he cleaned up, showed up and knocked off some of the most powerful scenes on TV. He never blew an acting call. There were no rumors about missed table reads, no whispers among directors about mysterious “sick days.” So, this is a story that didn’t have to be told — or did it?

“I thought, ‘Why me? Why did I get spared?’ I should’ve been dead,” Williams says. “I have the scars. I’ve stuck my head in the lion’s mouth. Obviously, God saved me for a purpose. So, I decided to get clean and then come clean. I’m hoping I can reach that one person.”

As he talks, the world has come full circle. Williams is sitting in a chair in the Rev. Ronald Christian’s office — the same chair he flopped into when he told his story — truthfully — for the first time. He had been dragged to the Christian Love Baptist Church in Irvington by a friend who worried that Williams was on borrowed time, a fraud living half of his life in Newark’s nether world. And if there was one person who could save him, she thought, it was Christian — the guy known to the flock as “Rev. Ron.”

“You gotta get you some Rev. Ron,” she told him.

Williams insists he actually came to the church willingly — at least subconsciously — because “my makeup was running, my mask was fading away. I was ready to get out of that life.” He was kicking coke — trying to, anyway. And it felt good to tell the pastor everything: “I laid it all out. It was the first time I really laid everything out to anyone. I was a total stranger to him, but I felt very comfortable with him.”

Maybe there was a reason for that connection: Christian has been down, too — broke, homeless, with a criminal record. “Fourteen rehabs, nine detoxes, three years in prison,” the pastor says when asked for his résumé. His well-pressed prison pants hang in a closet in his church office, and he brings them out when he needs credibility — like a doctor pointing to a diploma on the wall.

“He put that out there right off the bat,” Williams says. “He had instant credibility. He never judged me. After that first time, I would come back here high. I didn’t kick it right away. He knew that. I would never disrupt the services. But you could look at my eyes and tell. He never let me leave without giving me money. He probably gave me two grand altogether. He made sure I could eat. He always asked, ‘Are you okay?’ He loved me until I could love myself.”

Together, they laugh about that first day, when Christian raced back from a service in Harlem because, church officials told him, some guy named Omar was in trouble. Wanted men and women turn themselves in to Christian all the time, so Rev. Ron, not knowing the details, feared the worst.

Jennifer BrownWilliams with pastor Ron Christian.

The sign on the church says, “Sinners are welcome,” and are they ever. In 2007, James Madison, aka the “Hat Bandit” rejected an offer to plead guilty to robbing banks, until Christian spoke to him about accountability. That same year, Bernard Hoover, accused of murdering his father, wanted to attend his father’s funeral at Christian’s church and see his mother before being taken away. He was arrested at the church and later convicted. In 2008, Nicole Guyette, eventually found guilty of aggravated manslaughter, sought Christian’s counsel before agreeing to turn herself in.

“There aren’t too many churches where you can go and say, ‘I just killed someone,’ and they’ll let you in first and call the police second,” Christian says. “But this is one of them.”

He was relieved Williams was just another drug user trying to get clean. Christian has done dozens of those. They don’t always take the first time, but they’re a whole lot easier than a murder surrender and all those follow-up prison visits. So, he let Williams unburden himself before interrupting toward the end of the cathartic tell-all.

“So, what do you do?” Christian asked.

Williams smiled, like he had gotten the joke — only it wasn’t a punch line.

“I thought, ‘This dude is bugging.’ My ego was totally kicking up,” Williams says. “I mean, he had to know me. Everyone knows Omar. It was so foolish to think everyone knew me because of ‘The Wire,’ but that’s where my ego was. So I played along. I said, ‘I’m in entertainment.’ ”

“Half of me said, ‘Walk out of the office, because he’s playing you,’ ” Williams recalls. “But the other half said, ‘What you came here for has nothing to do with your work anyway.’ So, I kept talking, and he says, ‘I like you.’ He gives me a piece of paper and says, ‘Write down your name, number and e-mail.’ I wrote it down and he looked at the paper and said, ‘So what do you want to be called?’ ”

“I said, ‘My name is Michael Williams, but my friends call me Mike.’ So he says, ‘What’s all this Omar stuff? People keep telling me Omar is in trouble. Who the hell is Omar?’ ”

“He had no clue who I was,” Williams recalls. “That was humbling.”

But, truth be told, even Williams wasn’t sure who he was. Mike Williams was a contradiction. He was a skinny kid who acted tough but hid behind a mom who protected him by whupping on the mothers of the bullies who picked on him in their Brooklyn neighborhood.

He was the boy who rarely saw his father, but later established — and maintained — close relationships with an assortment of half-brothers and half-sisters.

He was a relatively straight-laced kid who turned to drugs to gain entry to the in-crowd. He was the so-so athlete who wanted to play in the NBA. He was a Hollywood star with an off-Broadway paycheck that mostly went up his nose. He was a pacifist with a barroom-brawl, razor scar down the middle of his face. He played a sneering killer but started his career in dance tights.

On set, he was Omar Little, the Robin Hood of the hood feared by fictional street thugs who feared nothing else. Off it, he was an aimless soul begging for someone — anyone — to love and accept him for who he was, not who he played.

“I suffered from a huge identity crisis,” Williams says. “People say they love the characters I’ve chosen in my career. But I didn’t choose anything. I just happened to be working and these were offered to me. But when I look at the characters, I got to exorcise my demons, a lot. In the end, I was more comfortable with Omar’s skin than my own. That was a problem.

“I got picked on a lot as a kid. No one was scared of Mike. I was trying to get accepted by the cool kids. But they wouldn’t let me in. So, I thought, ‘I can be a party kid.’ I had the weed, I got the liquor. I basically bought my way into that group with my soul. But that wasn’t me.

“I have to be honest, though, playing Omar was a rush. The response I was getting from people on the street was gratifying. He was my Superman suit, and I had no problem with that. He gave me better street cred than Mike Williams would ever get.”

Fellow users knew him only as Omar. They couldn’t understand how he could be on a hit show and have to beg money for drugs. “Yo, Omar, where’s the Benz?” they asked. They thought everyone on TV made millions and lived in houses next to the Hollywood sign. “I had no money. It’s HBO. I was broke,” Williams says. But to people on the corners, every actor has Al Pacino’s bank account.

“People didn’t even call me Mike, they called me Omar. But that wasn’t unusual because everybody had an alias,” Williams says. “No one was called their government (name) on the block, so they called me Omar or ‘O.’ That mixed with my identity crisis and my addiction — and it was not a good mix. I had to stop trying to be Omar and just be Mike.”

Pastor and pupil text daily, and Christian laughs when he hears Williams say he has buried Omar, because sometimes Williams still brings the iconic badass to church.

“I’m trying to limit his cursing,” the pastor says. “When he testifies, he’s, like, ‘I was being a (freakin’) hypocrite’ or ‘I made some stupid (effin’) decisions.’ He’s authentic, but maybe he could be less real, a little less Omar, you know?”

Jennifer BrownMichael K. Williams with friends on the steps of a Newark home there he once lived.

It’s a Sunday afternoon in early spring and Williams stands in an alcove, outside the pastor’s office, huddling and whispering with fellow members of the Christian Love congregation. Just minutes before, these five had been among more than a hundred congregants testifying and praying, singing and swaying in a raucous two-hour service that could be heard, through locked windows, three blocks away.

Earlier, when Rev. Ron had told the packed house that “anything is possible with Jesus Christ,” they had agreed, unanimously, with applause and amens and hands to the sky. And who could doubt what he was saying, especially here at “the Gangster Church,” as Williams calls it — where welfare and Wall Street pray side-by-side, where cops and former most-wanteds hold hands, where felons turn themselves in, — in the eyes of God, the eyes of the law, or both.

Oh, sure, anything is possible, but it doesn’t mean it comes easily, even with divine help from the all-knowing, all-powerful, all-present. This is, after all, Irvington, and redemption rarely sticks the first time around.

Here’s what all the whispering is about: After bailing out of alcohol detox early, Williams’ friend is refusing to make a commitment to a 28-day program that could save her. And Williams is torn: Patiently, he has endured the tired game-playing and excuse-making of an addict who refuses help. After all, it’s a game he played until he got clean. He wants to give her an ultimatum, but is afraid she’ll call his bluff. And he can’t just walk away, because she was the one who saved him. The irony isn’t lost on Williams.

“That’s the way she is. She can fix your problem, but not herself,” Williams says. “I want to give her some tough love, but I know that if that doesn’t work, I can’t walk away. How do you walk away from someone who has helped save your life? Look at all I have today. I might not have any of it without her. Walk away? You want to, out of frustration, but you just can’t. What would have happened if people had just walked away from me?”

In the end, Williams was rescued by strangers — Rev. Ron and a Newark family of brothers he met at a party. He told the four Hill brothers that he needed a place to crash for a while and they threw open their doors — no rent, no questions asked. To repay the debt he felt — and not because they asked — Williams sanded floors for Five Brothers Construction, their home-fix-up-and-flipping company. Imagine that: Omar worked a real job, and it felt pretty good.

“My brothers, me and Mike — we all clicked. He was a good guy,” Marcus Hill says, standing outside his home on Isabella Street in Newark.

But he was using.

“Never around us,” Hill says. “Never in my house. He made us crazy when he disappeared, but that part of him didn’t last long. He cleaned his (stuff) up.”

Their first day as landlord/tenant was a memorable one: Flush with cash, the brothers wanted to go shopping, and Williams introduced them to Fifth Avenue — Polo and Ralph Lauren and price tags that looked like phone numbers. On their way back, they were stopped by the police, who wrote two tickets for not wearing seatbelts.

“I barely know him and already I’m 130 bucks in the hole,” Hill says with a laugh.

On this day, Williams has returned to Isabella Street for a visit and the word is out. Neighbors are streaming out of their homes to say hi to the star formerly known as Omar, who, back then, was snorting paychecks and scraping together dimes for a pack of cigarettes.

Dozens encircle him. Women flirt. Guys give him a bro hug. Kids gawk. They want to know: Is he back for the day? Staying longer? Has he met any big stars since the last time he was here? Williams might be living at a chic Brooklyn address these days, but this, clearly, is home.

“When I lived in their basement, I was surrounded by a lot of love,” Williams says. “Nothing but love. I’m not proud of what I did, but I want to make it clear: Drugs were never even allowed on this block. Your weed, your alcohol, that was okay. But no under-the-counter stuff. No crack, no cocaine, no heroin. None of that stuff. You had to go get it where you got it from and use it there. They had no idea I was addicted. I wasn’t honest about who I was.

“It was probably a novelty having an actor in the house, but the Omar thing wore off fast. I had no money. They bought me clothes. They were supporting me.”

Jennifer Brown

Four-year-old Anthony Marcallo is bored stiff in one of the 19 pediatric intensive care beds at Newark Beth Israel Medical Center. Now, he has a visitor, who is packing a Mickey Mouse puzzle, a 64-crayon box and a coloring book. Williams is making the rounds and hanging with children. As the father of two grown boys, he connects easily.

With no help from Williams, but a lot of cheerleading, Anthony knocks off the puzzle in about four minutes, and his victory grin is wall-to-wall.

Next up is Adonis Scotland, a 13-year-old who schools Williams in the video game “Plants vs. Zombies.” Williams tries to distract the boy, who is wearing a Giants hat. “So, you’re a Giants fan?” The kid nods and never takes his eyes off the screen. “You’re kicking my butt!” Williams squeals.

As the teen goes all Omar on the monsters, Williams discovers, during their one-sided chat, that ESPN costs extra on the hospital’s TV menu. He quietly asks how he can pay for the boy to get every sports channel he wants. “Don’t worry, I’ll get on it,” a hospital administrator says.

Anthony Price, Williams’ friend and executive assistant, watches from a corner. “He loves this stuff,” Price says. “He’ll talk about these kids all the way back to Brooklyn.”

As Williams moves from room to room, the parents are thrilled by the visit and thankful that someone cares — and a total stranger at that. “Strangers helped me, remember?” Williams says. “God has blessed me. I’ve been given a lot. I’m at peace with myself. It’s time to give back.” He mentions his dream of a community center, maybe two, in Newark with his name on them.

An hour or so later, as the kids tucker out near bedtime and Williams exits the ward, Meybi Perez, one of the moms, says thanks.

“Where do I know you from?” she asks. “Who are you? Are you a TV star?”